Review

Straw Dogs by John Gray

reviewed byDiana Judd

J

ohn
Gray has a bone to pick. His latest book, Straw
Dogs, takes aim at a host of targets in what
appears to be a wholesale deconstruction of human
thought. Religion, humanism, philosophy, belief in
progress (indeed, belief in anything),
industrialization, even civilization itself has,
according to Gray, kept us from realizing our true
nature: that we are just one more species of animal.
And since “other animals do not need a purpose in
life . . . can we not think of the aim of life as
being simply to see?”

In
two hundred pages of text, Gray never explains what
this means. Instead, the reader is treated to an
array of disconnected quotations from Aristotle to
Zarathustra, none of which serve to illustrate a
coherent argument. Straw Dogs does contain
moments where important topics such as the
environment and the idea of progress, the future of
genetic engineering and its effect on humanity, and
the underlying philosophies of western and eastern
religions are raised. Yet Gray merely dabbles on the
surface of these issues (each of which would require
a separate volume to explore), content merely to
mention their existence. The end result is an
incoherent book which goes nowhere and says very
little. Gray’s final message—that humanity’s purpose
in life should be “simply to see,” yet the human
animal “cannot do with out a purpose,” is at best
anti-climatic and at worst a failure to tie together
its preceding chapters.

The
book is a string of aphorisms, each varying wildly
in both length and subject matter. No doubt Gray was
influenced by such works as Nietzsche’s Human,
All Too Human and Adorno’s Minima
Moralia, but Straw Dogs lacks both the
depth and coherence that characterize those two
works. What’s more, his aphoristic format seems
forced. Gray states in his acknowledgments that
though his thoughts are presented in “fragments,”
they are not unsystematic. He also writes that the
aphorisms may either be read in sequence or “dipped
into at will.” Whatever his intentions, the overall
effect of his schema is a nearly random flitting
from topic to topic, his thoughts never alighting
long enough to explore any one of them in useful
detail.

Gray’s book contains many inconsistencies and
contradictions. Among the most egregious is his
treatment of science. On the one hand, Gray states
that “the origins of science are not in rational
inquiry but in faith, magic and trickery,” while on
the other hand he equates science with technology,
from which, according to Gray, its power flows.
While he does not go so far as to declare that
technology is trickery or magic, the implication is
clear. Furthermore, his stance that the origins of
science lie in magic and trickery while its success
lies in superior rhetoric betrays a fundamental
misunderstanding of the history and philosophy of
science. It is rather surprising that a professor of
European Thought at the London School of Economics
would so thoroughly neglect both Francis Bacon and
Rene Descartes.

Another inconsistency lies in Gray’s extensive usage
of quotations from both western and eastern
philosophy to buttress his argument that philosophy
is so much bunk obscuring the truth about humanity.
In addition, he continually references Darwin
(without once explaining the actual theory of
evolution) and recent advances in genetic research
to illustrate his point that humans are merely
animals and should consider themselves as such,
while at the same time relentlessly decrying science
and its origins. Apparently, Gray believes that
neither Darwin’s theory of evolution nor genetic
research fall under the rubric of science, or for
that matter, philosophy as he understands it.

All
in all, Straw Dogs is a confusing book with
no useful underlying message. While Gray does at
times raise some interesting and controversial
topics, his treatment of them is too brief and
shallow to justify a serious perusal of the work. No
doubt Gray intended Straw Dogs to be a work
of popular philosophy and not an academic offering.
It is a shame that he thinks the former must be
characterized by inconsistency, contradiction, and
superficiality.

Diana Judd
received her Ph. D. in Political Science from
Rutgers University.